


don't take my kodachrome

by thisstableground



Series: less than ninety degrees [21]
Category: Do No Harm (TV)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22146499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Vanessa takes pictures, and lowkey resents how all this "art" crap requires her to look inside herself and grow emotionally and other gross things, instead of just being able to wave a camera around and get paid for it.
Relationships: Ruben Marcado/Usnavi (In the Heights)/Vanessa (In the Heights)
Series: less than ninety degrees [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/713601
Kudos: 11





	don't take my kodachrome

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: it's kinda weird tagging these mainly ITH-character centric ones just as Do No Harm. i never usually put the crossover in the ITH tags because i don't want it to totally spam everyone there (and because tiny mostly-dead fandom is much less scary to post in) but maybe i'll go through and change a couple of them to have both fandom tags? thoughts?

Vanessa isn't the type of girl to scream and bounce around. She’ll shout, any kind of mood has a shout that suits it, but that’s different. There’s always exceptions. The second she catches sight of Nina coming in through the automatic doors at San Jose, she shrieks “NINAAA!” at the top of her lungs, ignoring the disapproving look from the old man standing next to her who caught the full force of it. “YO, ROSARIO, OVER HERE!”

“VANESSAAA!” Nina hollers in return.

Abandoning the search for her suitcase, Vanessa hurtles across the main entrance to fling herself at Nina, who meets her in the middle in a mess of hugging and jumping and questions that are going totally unanswered in favor of talking very loudly over each other.

“You’re here!”

“I’m here! Te extrañe, how have you _been_ , it’s been—“

“Since September _,_ demasiado tiempo! How was your flight? God, I can’t believe we’re actually gonna be—“

“Living together! ¡Lo sé! Vamos, vámonos, let’s do this already.” She grabs Nina’s hand and starts pulling her towards the doors.  
  
Nina pulls right back. “Suitcase?” she reminds her.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Sick mural,” Vanessa says, pointing at it as they pull out of the car park.

“I know, I always love seeing it when I get back here. Welcome to San Jose, home of the grasping pit of disembodied hands.”

Vanessa winds the window down to lean out, trying to see everything at once, even though there isn’t much to look at along the side of the highway. It’s new, that’s what matters. She’s so happy to be here she could sing.

Nina says, “put your head back in the window, you aren’t a dog.”

“I’m tryna get the breeze in my hair. This is your fault for not picking me up in a convertible, it’s ruining the whole aesthetic I had planned.

“Take it up with Violet, it’s her car."

“Oh, mira, palm trees, palm trees!” Vanessa points excitedly.

“Sad palm trees. They can’t all hack the winter.”

“Look at you, only two years in Cali and already so jaded with the lifestyle.”

“I can’t get excited every time I see a palm tree, they’re ubiquitous,” Nina says. “Also, editorial note, nobody here calls it Cali unless they’re a tourist, Aubrey was _very_ clear about that to me when I first met her. She’s a native.”

“Note taken. Y’know, it’s weird, I’ve never been the out-of-towner before? I’ll have to ask her how to blend in.”

“Oh, please don’t. Her California Opinions are almost as intense as when someone gets Usnavi started about the GWB.”

“Like you’re any better than he is. Hey, actually, is there anything I should avoid talking about with your housemates?” Vanessa asks, suddenly thinking about it. “Awkward topics, questions about family kinda thing.”

“None that I can think of off the top of my head? I mean, except for don’t be a homophobe, but since your boyfriends are pretty gay for each other you’re probably okay there.” Nina gives her a curious, sideways glance. “Kinda funny that you ask.”

“Why’s that?”

“‘Cause usually you say whatever you want and to hell with what people think.”

“Well. Everyone’s got their baggage, right? It don’t hurt not to be a dick.”

“Huh,” Nina says.

“Qué?”

“Nothing.”

“Nina.”

“It’s noo-thiiing,” Nina sings. “Just interesting.”

“ _What’s_ interesting? If you say nothing one more time, I swear —“

“Nada? Nil? Zero? Nix?”

“Fuck your thesaurus brain,” Vanessa says. “Hurry up and show me where you live already.”

“Where _we_ live,” Nina corrects her. “We’re _roomies_ , Vanessa, there’s no escaping me now.”

She laughs, theatrically evil.

“Dios ayúdame,” Vanessa mutters, crossing herself and turning back to the window. “Remember how we always said we were gonna buy that huge mansion together one day?”

“With the pool and the waterslide and an ice-cream freezer in every room?”

“And your giant library.”

“And your huge dance studio. Of course I remember.” Nina takes a right off the freewayand the streets start getting residential around them. 

The childhood plans never panned out, of course. By the time they were fifteen they knew the wind was blowing them both in different directions: Vanessa had no intention of going to college, there was no way Nina was ever not gonna go. Just the way things ended up. And now they’re gonna be living together in this Los Gatos suburb, surrounded by houses instead of apartment buildings and businesses. Trees and driveways and lawns _._ Couple of USA flags hanging off the side of houses. No Puerto Rico, no DR, no surprises there. There’s fucking _bungalows_. Nothing stretching up into the big empty sky.

The car slows to a crawl as they come up on the end of a street that seems so strange and empty, like all the streets have compared to downtown New York. Nina pulls into a driveway down the side of a small, grey-painted complex stacked only two high, cuts the ignition once she’s in the parking spot marked 1B in white paint. “Well, I hope you’re not expecting waterslides, but here we are. Home sweet home.”

***

Vanessa flings her arm out to the side when she wakes up not expecting to end up with it hanging off the bed into empty space where she’d been anticipating either Usnavi or at least a section of mattress which had recently contained Usnavi.

Single bed. Right. She’ll get used to it. Time’s gotta do most of the work on making the place home: two days isn’t enough for her to not feel intrusive wandering around the apartment and using the shower and taking food out of the fridge. It’s her stuff and her room and her food, but it’s not _hers_ yet.

Nina’s up already and sitting at the tiny kitchen table. Strange and familiar at once, walking into someone eating breakfast cereal with their face buried in a book and it’s only the fact Vanessa is still instinctively operating in houseguest mode that she makes the effort to say “‘sup, Nina, whatcha readin’?” instead of the disgruntled mash of consonants she always gives to Ruben at this hour.

“Book,” Nina says, holding it forward so Vanessa can read the cover herself. Calvino. _Invisible Cities_. Never heard of it.

“For school?”  
  
“For fun.”

“What’s it about?

Nina taps her fingers against the cover thoughtfully. “Home, I guess,” she says. “All the different homes a city can hold. Or all the different cities that can hold your hometown inside them even when you’re far away, maybe. I’ve read it a couple times already this year. You can borrow it once I’m done,” she adds. “You’d like it.”

Vanessa shrugs. Nina’s always trying to get her to read stuff. Vanessa, like most non-Nina people, can’t get through an entire novel in a single afternoon and rarely takes her up on the suggestions. “Maybe.”

A cloud of curls in oversized pajamas flings the door open and nearly knocks Vanessa off her feet. “Nina, have you—oh, Jesus!” Aubrey says, jumping back. Violet, immediately behind her, steadies her with a hand on her hip. “Scared the shit out of me, hi, Vanessa! I forgot we had someone else living with us. Are you all ready for your first day of work?”

“Yup,” Vanessa says, and then malfunctions trying to come up with an interesting second part to the sentence. It’s so _early_ to have to be a human.

Violet shoos Aubrey out of the way to get at the fridge. “You’ll have to excuse her. She’s a _morning person_.”

“II got one of those” Vanessa commiserates.

“Ah, so you moved here to escape?”

“I’m going to ignore that,” Aubrey says, tying her hair in a topknot out of the way of her face. “Babe, have you seen my key—“

“They’re on the table in the living room.”

Vanessa sips her instant coffee, grimaces at it and says “gotta admit the morning person does have his perks.”

“There’s a decent coffee place by the train station,” Nina says. “But I’ve not found anyone to match up to Usnavi here yet.”

“He’d never forgive you if you did.”

Nina’s right, obviously, the coffee place by the station does not match up to Usnavi, or even to Ruben, but it’s a million times better than instant, and she’s in desperate need of it this morning.

She isn’t nervous. Vanessa does not do nervous. First impressions aren’t her favorite thing and first days are full of them, but she can do them if she has to, it’s just she rarely wants to. Still. It’s not a wilderness so different from what she’s used to, waiting on the seats in the foyer while the sharp-dressed man on the front desk informs her new boss that she’s arrived. Idly watching the people passing in and out of the building she can see faint hints of the old offices in the new folk: who’s clients, who’s staff, who wants to be here and who’s just here for a paycheck until a woman who can only be Flora Cartwright descends on her: a name that sounds like it belongs to a soft-spoken 90-year-old grandmother attached to a lionness in impractically sharp heels that even Vanessa would have trouble walking in, Flora walks as confident and rhythmic as a military general, if military generals sashayed.

“Are you Vanessa?” she asks, eyes Vanessa like she’s deciding whether to eat her.

As if it’s the first time Vanessa’s gotten that look, though she’ll admit Flora is a pro at it. Vanessa meets the stare head-on and sticks her hand out and says “I am, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms Cartwright,” handshake firm and confident the way Kevin Rosario once spent an afternoon teaching her and Nina to perfect.

“Flora is fine,” she says, and leads the way to her office with her battlefield-runway walk.

Vanessa’s assessment of Flora in the first two seconds of seeing her was _this lady takes no shit_.. No icebreaker questions or personal chitchat, forthright teetering on the edge of rude. They jump almost immediately to work talk: Flora informs her that while they’re allowing her this first week as an adjustment period where she’ll basically be doing her old job, after that things are unpredictable and Vanessa will be expected to adapt to schedule changes with relatively short notice.

That’s no problem. Vanessa likes unpredictable.

“We’d rather you stay in the office during work hours at least for the first two weeks to get the lay of the land but after that it’s flexible provided you aren’t required on site. Don’t waste my time calling in, just remember to clock in and out online. The only excuse I’ll accept for missing a shoot or a meeting is if you die before it starts,” Flora says, then sets the papers she was reading from down on the desk and steeples her fingers under her chin, staring at Vanessa. “Any questions?”

“Yes, when do I get to start taking pictures?” Vanessa says. She wants to get to the _fun_ part.

“Your first shoot is scheduled for Tuesday, but you’ll only be shadowing for a while. After that, progress really depends on your performance. I’d also suggest working on your individual portfolio outside of company hours. Do you have access to your own equipment?”

“I was led to understand that this position would allow me explore the options before I make an investment in my own setup,” Vanessa says, half-bullshit professional talk tripping easy off her tongue. Flora doesn’t need to know that being a photographer hadn’t even occurred to Vanessa till she got offered this internship back in November and that for all she knows she’ll hate it, or that she don’t know shit about shit when it comes to the technicalities of photography. Nobody ever got successful by telling the truth, after all. She can play the game and learn as she goes.

“We can sign you out a company camera for two weeks at a time, but I’d really recommend you get your own as soon as possible.”

“Sure, no problem,” Vanessa says smoothly, also not mentioning that there’s no way in hell she can afford a decent camera. Deal with that when it’s a problem.

“If that’s all I won’t keep you any longer, Todd will show you around and answer any other questions you have,” Flora says, standing and reaching out her hand to shake again. “Welcome aboard, Vanessa. We have high expectations of everyone who works with us and there were plenty of people hoping to be offered this internship, so I hope that you’ll do great things with this opportunity.”

Vanessa says, “I _only_ do great things.”

It wins her a short, rough laugh that feels like a victory. 

***

Nina seems different here.

Vanessa can’t tell if it’s because they’ve just changed like people do, or if Nina’s putting on an act to fit in here, or if the way she is back home when she visits in the summer is acting, or maybe it’s just that Vanessa’s gotten too used to the boys who live life with visible thought-bubbles over their heads while Nina is and always has been fucking inscrutable.

On entirely the opposite end, Vanessa has always been outspoken and kind of a bitch. She likes to think that’s why Nina likes her. In that spirit, she says “you’re so boring today.”

Nina gives her a disbelieving look. “I’m studying.”

“You’re always studying,” Vanessa says. “What are you gonna do when you graduate and there’s no more studying to do?”

“I try not to think about that.”

“Bullshit, is this really Nina ‘I Have An Actual Five Year Plan’ Rosario talking?”

“Five Year Plan Nina died when I realized I can’t finish college in three. The whole timeline was thrown off. Now I’m No Plan Nina, with no plans.” Vanessa looks at her. Nina hunches her shoulders defeatedly. “ _Fine_ , now I have _seven_ five-year-plans to account for potential setbacks or changes, and all of them are terrifyingly fragile. Please don’t ask me about them, I don’t wanna have to make an eighth to account for all the time I’ll lose to the existential crisis about my future.”

“Mood,” Vanessa says. “The future part, not the multiple timelines, that’s pathological and you should consider therapy.”

“I’d have to make an eighth plan to account for therapy time,” Nina says.

“Are you kidding? I seriously can’t tell.”

“Who knows?” Nina says cheerfully.

Vanessa sure as shit doesn’t know. It bothers her, more so now that she’s seeing Nina on a day to day basis and is constantly aware of what she’s not aware of. People know full well when Vanessa’s upset no matter how hard she tries to keep her cool, she seethes and scowls and stomps around. Nina is months of perfectly believable smiles and then slams you with “by the way I didn’t say anything but I have been in emotional turmoil for weeks and also just made a huge risky life decision okay byeee” and runs off before the sentence even hits your eardrums.

Being honest, it hurt that Nina never told her about dropping out until so long after the fact. There were so many chances to talk things over before it got that bad, even if it was just to vent. It hurt hearing second-hand from Usnavi that Benny and Nina were having problems, waiting to hear the other side of it and Nina not saying a damn word up until “me and Benny broke up last week, by the way.”

They both suck at being the person who says _hey, I’m struggling here, help me out_ , they always have. It’s supposed to cancel out with each other. Vanessa tells Nina stuff, things she doesn’t talk to the boys about. It’s not easy, but it’s sometimes _important_.

She isn’t gonna say anything. Not yet. But Vanessa’s sitting a couple feet across from a girl she’s been best friends with almost twenty-five years, who she’s sat across a thousand tables from since kindergarten through high school and she feels kind of like a stranger, and she’s not gonna let what she suspects happened with Benny happen to their friendship, just a void of unspoken things growing bigger over time.

*

Vanessa ain’t lazy, but she’s got through a lot of her life on a _enough, but not extra_ policy for most things. Why do more than required when you’re not guaranteed to get a return on it? Sure, she’s worked her ass off on more than her share of ten-hour shifts and early mornings, but there’s a difference between working hard and trying hard. Working hard is hours, time, energy. Trying hard is risky: it means caring means letting people know you _want_ something _,_ and the problem with trying is, sometimes you don’t get anything out of it.

For all that she wears fearlessness like a jacket, Vanessa’s historically always leaned towards the easy. Moving downtown was nothing: what’s difficult about leaving when the only thing on the line is the thing slowly sucking the life out of you?

Usnavi, though. Now, he was a risk. Usnavi, who she’d known longer than she can remember, this big-hearted boy who could have found someone so much easier to love but went for Vanessa without looking back. Usnavi meant admitting to herself that she couldn’t keep trying to half-ass what they had together. It meant admitting _I want him, and I might not get what I want in the end but I’m still going to give it my best shot_. Ruben was risky: someone that in the scheme of things Vanessa had barely known any time but she resonated to something defensive and proud and sweet she saw in him, so she let him in on her love and her Usnavi and all the crossover area where those two things are the same.

They were worth it, even if it means - sneaky, earnest sons of bitches that they are - they tricked her into the idea that trying ain’t so bad, and now here she is actually giving a damn about her job.

At school she learned just enough to keep the teachers off her back and so what if she didn’t do amazing? Here she’s finding out that even if someone _sounds_ like a pretentious jackass, sometimes it’s because they do know more than her and she can learn from them. Here, she’s listening and even better, she’s doing: piecing together skills by guesswork and getting hands on and taking a whole bunch of bad photos to test the settings on her borrowed DSLR, her brain constantly flickering with tiny sparks that might turn into inspiration some day, when she figures out how to harness them.

So maybe trying pays off, or at least that’s what she's starting to think right up till her twenty-minute Friday mentoring session where she shows some of her favorite shots from a day wandering around catching some street fashion to Flora who nods, and then says “is this what you plan to put in your portfolio?” in a tone that strongly implies the right answer is no. 

”I was just hoping for advice,,” Vanessa says, even though the more accurate answer was _yeah, actually._ She’d thought they were pretty good work for a beginner.

“You have to look at every picture you’re taking like it’s competition. Ask yourself, why would a client choose these over any number of amateur Instagrammers with good equipment? Look.” Flora turns her screen so Vanessa can watch her click through photo after photo. “Cliché. Cliché. There’s nothing wrong with them technically - though you really should consider investing in a tripod - but they are _boring_. I know you have plenty of personality. Why am I not seeing that in your work?”

The fuck’s she meant to say to that?

“Do you understand what I’m asking from you?” Flora asks when Vanessa doesn’t respond straight away, in a tone that's either condescending or kind. Doesn’t matter which, Vanessa don’t like either.

“Yes,” Vanessa says, with a professional smile. “Yes, of course, absolutely. I’ll work on that. Thanks for the feedback.”

She has no idea what Flora is asking her to do.

***

Vanessa isn’t a kid, she can take constructive criticism, especially when it’s just for some dumb job that she don’t even care about all that much. Not like she came into it with any illusions about being the next Ansel Adams. Still, the meeting with Flora weighs all day somewhere in Vanessa’s chest that she deals with like the mature, adjusted woman she is: repressing it with a slowly bubbling resentment until she can go somewhere to complain without getting fired.

“How was work?” Aubrey asks when Vanessa gets home. Vanessa flings her bag across the room and says “ugh.”

“That good?”

“You wouldn’t believe—” Vanessa starts, then gets interrupted by her phone ringing. “Ugghgh,” she says again, with extra flavor. “Sorry, I should take this. Hi, Mom.”

“Hey, V. How’s California?”

“Californian," Vanessa says, heading off to shut herself in her room. "How’s New York?”

“New Yorky.”

“Cool.” She should try harder. It’s nice that Mom even bothered to call; honestly, Vanessa had kind of forgotten she existed. “What are you up to? You still at the new job?”

“Everyone I work with is whiny PTA moms, they spend all day trying to one-up each other on who’s shithead kids are the most successful.”

“Ew,” Vanessa says. She’s always hated that kind of mom. The overmakeupped I’ll Speak To Your Manager types, sneering at Vanessa whenever she passed them at the school gates like they ain’t got nothing better to do than be so tragically overinvolved in their kids lives that they’re picking them up well into high school. Like, grow up, Vanessa’s been walking herself home since she was seven. _“_ Do they all talk about how they’re readin’ Fifty Shades of Grey with their book club ‘cause their husbands can’t satisfy them?”

“They’re all reading Fifty Shades at their _desks.”_

 _“_ Nightmare scenario.”

“No wonder they all go for liquid lunches every day, it’s probably the only way they stay sane. God knows I’m always losing my mind by midday.”

“Mom.” Vanessa knows where this goes - _it’s boring, I need some fun in my life, I’m just going out for one drink, oh look I’m unemployed again Vanessa I just need enough to keep the lights on it wasn’t my fault —_

“Lighten up, I’m just kidding,” Mom says. “They invited me for cocktails last Friday and I turned them down, actually.”

Vanessa wonders if she should say _well done_ or _I’m proud of you_. She just says “cool” again. There’s no point having strong feelings about it, she’s learned that much.

After a silence two seconds too long to be comfortable, Mom asks, “so hows your job going anyway?” and because Vanessa had come home with a rant all wound up to go she says “my boss told me my pictures are cliche today” without really thinking about it.

“She said that?”

“Seriously! I pack up my life to literally the other side of the country just so a some snooty old hag can tell me I take bad pictures, the fuck. _She’s_ a cliche. Like, girl, we all seen Devil Wears Prada and you ain’t no Meryl Streep —”

“Well,” Mom says, “ _are_ they cliche?”

“¿Qué?”

“The stuff you’re showing her, is it cliche?”

“It—I don’t know,” Vanessa says, thrown. “Maybe? But —”

“I mean, that’s her job, ain’t it? To tell you when you’re not doin’ enough to—”

“But I’m sayin’ she didn’t even tell me _how_ to—”

“She does run a whole company,” Mom says, in a Reasonable Voice. “Can’t expect her to hold your hand the whole way, right?”

“Yeah,” Vanessa says. Don't engage. Never fuckin’ engage. “I guess. I have to go now.”

“Oh, don’t take it like that, I just meant—”

“I’m not taking it like nothin’, I just really do have to go.”

“Okay then,” her mom says doubtfully, and then adds, “love you, kiddo.”

“Bye, Mom,” Vanessa says.

***

Vanessa is listlessly flopping her arm around with the camera, taking a bunch of random unframed shots of her bedroom window or the fridge or the front door hoping she’ll capture some instinctive photography magic hidden inside her when a messy-haired Usnavi Facetimes her, even though it’s well gone midnight in New York.

“A thing happened!” he says, no preamble. His camera is jiggling. That old Usnavi leg bounce.

“What kind of thing?" she asks warily. "You okay? Ruben okay?”

“Ohh, we are super okay.” He pulls his tank top up over his face to hide everything but his eyes, which are crinkly and mischievous and nervous. “Sooo. Me and Ruben…had seeex today?” His pitch rises to cartoonish levels at the end like it’s a question.

“…Congrats?”

“I mean. Y’know.” He does a confusing and obscene little mime. “ _Ruben_ had sex with _me_ today. Like, with his dick, and my—yeah.”

She gasps. “¡No me diga!”

“¡Te fuckin’ digo!”

“Holy shit, tell me _everything!_ How did it happen? _”_

“I dunno. I guess I’ve been thinkin’ about it sometimes but life got in the way. Then today he came home and we were just talkin’ and foolin’ around a bit and…I just looked at him and I knew like, yeah, I’m ready.”

“Were you nervous?”

 _“_ Un poco. But not too much. It’s _Ruben_ , you know?"

Vanessa knows: Ruben, the most patient man in history, so cautious about everything that it would be infuriating if it weren’t always so directed towards their happiness. It's very hard not to feel in safe hands with him.

“And,” Usnavi breaks off to giggle in his squeaky way, pink-cheeked, “and it was good. It was…nngh. It was _very_ good.“ 

“Damn. That’s wild.” She kinda wants to applaud or laugh really hard or make Usnavi wake Ruben up so she can get his side of the gossip, and she kinda wants to shut the call off and pout about it a little, too. How did she miss out on that? How did she not know that Usnavi had been building up to this? And also a very vivid mental image is distracting her just enough that she can’t quite figure out how she feels. Jealously horny? “And you didn’t even film it for me. Booo.”

“Next time,” he says, laughing. “I was kinda distracted this one. It was… I don’t feel as different as I expected? But then I also feel _way_ more different than I expected? And I was just watchin’ him sleep and he looks all peaceful and I had to come call you and see your face to make everything perfect.”

Aw. Well. It’s hard to maintain any jealousy when he says things like that. “That’s cute.”

“Also, I can’t sleep because my ass feels janky now,” he adds.

“Aaand you ruined it.”

“Like, I showered but I don’t think I’ll ever not be lubey again. It’s become a part of me forever, Vanessa. All eternity as a human slip-n-slide.”

“Jeez. Don’t sit on my couch.”

Usnavi gives her a big dumb gorgeous grin and says “so! Now we all caught up on the state of my ass, how’s things with you?”

“Yeah, it’s all good.”

“Oh no, what happened?”  
  
“What? Nothin’.”

“Querida, you think I ain’t know your Somethin’ Wrong voice by now? You get all head register.”

“Do I?” She catches sight of the DSLR on her bed out the corner of her eye and sighs. “I guess I’m kinda on a block with my portfolio.”

“You still hung up on that shit your boss was sayin’?”

“Hard not to be hung up when she says the same thing every damn time I show her my stuff. I don’t even know what I’m doing wrong. Maybe I just ain’t good at this.”

“No!” Usnavi says, fiercely. “You are a great photographer, you shut your dang mouth.”

“Pft. You like me too much for your opinion to mean anything.”

“Hurtful. Anyway, got the job in the first place, didn’t you? And she ain’t said you’re _bad_ , you just need more time to figure out your groove. Like, I bet fuckin’ Van Gogh drew stick figures for ages before he got on the sunflower thing. You gotta grow into art.”

“I guess.” Vanessa points at him. “But _you_ picked up a guitar like two weeks ago and you’re already writin’ your own songs. How come you can already make it sound like _yours_? How do you do that?”

“I played guitar and piano all through high school, I ain’t that new at it,” Usnavi points out. “But I don’t know how much of it’s actually original so much as it is I’m just mixin’ up a bunch of other people’s stuff. If you make it sound like enough different songs all at once it’s kinda like makin’ something new.”

“I don’t know how that’d work with a picture. How d’you think I make my photos look different than other people’s?”

“Iuno.” Usnavi frowns hard, obviously racking his brain for a good answer. “Turn the camera sideways?”

***

She turns the camera sideways. Now all her photos suck in portrait. She misses Usnavi.

***

Vanessa takes pictures: at work, when she’s not relegated to shifting lights around or doing glorified runner duties for the more demanding models. Fashion photography, taking pictures of someone else’s art. She doesn’t know how to make a random designer’s clothes on a random woman say _Vanessa García._ Vanessa takes pictures: portfolio work on her borrowed DSLR, furious full-day excursions exploring hidden corners of the suburbs and the city, in stolen seconds to herself on the commute and on her lunchbreak. The vibration of life and adventure and newness goes still and flat every time she tries to pin it down.

The conversations with Flora end the same way: it’s trite. It’s cliché. It isn’t Vanessa.

“But she ain’t tellin’ me how to _do_ nothin’ about it, so like, how’s your mentorin’?” she complains.

“Just ask around till you find out what kinda style she’s into then copy that,” Violet suggests.

“That won’t help, you need to find a niche. What are you passionate about?” Aubrey asks.

“Nothin’, I don’t think? There’s stuff I get happy about but nothin’ that I’m like, this is My Thing.”

“Passion isn’t always about the thing that makes you happy,” Nina says. “Sometimes it’s about the thing that makes you want to smash your head into a wall and scream but for some reason you keep going back to it anyway.”

Violet tuts. “New rule, Nina isn’t allowed to interject until she gets a healthy work-life balance.”

“Seconded,” Vanessa says, but she’ll say this much: Nina’s never been lacking in passion for what she does. Nina’s never not had ambitions and ideas and causes and beliefs. Meanwhile Vanessa pretty much just fell into working for the magazine by luck and a good connection through a couple salon customers. She’s here by accident. Basically her life story.

“Nina says I gotta find a thing to care enough about I wanna hit my head on a wall,” Vanessa says to Ruben, because fuck yeah she's complaining to anyone who'll listen, what about it? “Which is easy for someone who gets like that whenever she thinks for more than five minutes at a time about literally anythin’.”

“She’s not wrong, though,” Ruben says. “People think passion’s just being really into a thing. Which it is, kind of. But really it’s just the feeling that makes you keep going through the bits where a project gets tedious or when it would be easier to do something else.”

“Eh, I've always been a big fan of bouncin’ as soon as things get difficult.”

She’s mostly kidding, but Ruben’s voice is purely offended when he says “Vanessa, that’s the biggest load of bullshit I ever heard and I used to hang out with Jason Cole on the daily. You’ve stuck by me. You’ve stuck by Usnavi. That hasn't always been a walk in the park. You shouldn't be so hard on yourself.”

“Whatever. Can’t make a living out of pictures of you and Usnavi so y'all are useless.” Vanessa puts her feet up on the coffee table, poking gently at the handle of her empty coffee mug with her toes so that it shifts round in a jerky circle. “It's easy for people like you and Nina. You basically came out of the womb in a labcoat, you've always known what you’re doin’.”

“I don’t always,” Ruben says. “I don't know what I'm doing right now. The lab keeps calling me about Blackout and I’ve been ignoring them for a month.”

“Oh.” What hope’s she got about finding her thing if someone like _Ruben_ ain’t even on steady ground? “How come you ain't called them?”

It takes him so long to answer she checks to make sure the call’s not cut off, but finally he says, very quietly, “I’m—m-my, my brain doesn’t work as well as it used to. And it’s — y’know what, never mind, we’ll talk about my shit some other time. My point is, I haven’t called them back. But nobody made Blackout for me when I needed it. Nobody else is gonna make it if I don’t do it. If there’s something in your life you’ve needed, chances are other people have been in the same position, and if you can find a way to use your skills to provide it, that’s where you find your thing.” Ruben’s voice goes serious, intense. “Vanessa, don’t think about what sells or what your boss wants. What is it that you _need_?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” she says.

***

Vanessa takes pictures: quick, thoughtless phone selfies in the bad lighting of clubs laughing with coworkers, snapchats of Violet helping Aubrey home after a bar complaining about how much of a lightweight she is, videos to send to the boys of Nina doing her impression of Usnavi while the camera shakes with Vanessa’s laughter. Worth recording, worth remembering, all pieces of Vanessa in life as it is now. Never seems to work when she’s using the good camera, when she tries to take a second to frame a shot proper.

Vanessa gets pictures from back home all the time.

Ruben’s are always carefully taken, neat and restrained the same as when he draws his steady-handed little cartoons and diagrams, parallel lines she can tell he used the grid overlay on his phone to get just right. Ruben sends her pictures, of Usnavi chaotic in the middle of Ruben’s tidy composition with spaghetti sauce dropped all down his shirt, of the sunrises that she was never awake early enough to see even when she was back in NYC, of trinkets and junk in store windows that remind him of her. Ruben likes taking pictures of inanimate objects grouped in threes and saying “look, it’s us”.

Usnavi’s pictures are frequently incomprehensible. He never bothers to check if his finger’s obscuring the lens or if anything’s in focus or if he’s using the wrong-facing camera on his iPhone: he sends them all anyway and Vanessa likes seeing the mistakes as much as the ones that work. Usnavi sends her videos, of Ruben humming to himself while he doesn’t know he’s being filmed, of Usnavi in an empty subway car with the phone propped up while he jumps over seats and swings on the poles singing showtunes, of his hands and his body and the blur of movement when he’s naked and turned on and missing her, _something to keep you goin’ til we come visit, querida._

Dani mostly sends videos so that she can talk all over them. Carla’s pictures are always near-cartoonish under the layers of filters and emojis. Sonny needs to learn any kind of filming technique that isn’t “dramatically zooming in and out very fast” but when she tells him that he just sends her more of them till she has to mute notifications from him.

They all share pictures of the good things and the pretty things and that’s great but there’s so many things left unrecorded that she knows must be happening. There’s Usnavi averting his eyes when he walks past the old bodega, there’s Ruben holding a ringing phone he can’t bring himself to answer. There’s a Vanessa under the visual image of Vanessa who isn’t pretty in the slightest. There’s a Vanessa who was built in arguments and forgotten birthdays and resignation, who learned to never need anyone to hold her hand and guide her through anything. It’s risky to admit you want things at all. It’s straight up crazy to admit you want something you know is impossible. She’s never even tried to take pictures of what that feeling looks like.

***

It's a Friday evening where the early suggestions of Spring hang warm in the air and Vanessa’s sitting at the top of the stairs outside their two-storey apartment building when Nina drops beside her and says “Aubrey said you were moping out here.”

“Ain’t mopin’,” Vanessa objects. “I’m takin’ sunset pictures. Leanin' in, since I'm already so cliche."

She holds the camera up and clicks it somewhere in the direction of the sunset. Their out-of-town suburb is quiet at night, and even though she isn’t trapped here like she used to feel in the barrio, she still feels like there’s something that she wants, a weird little ache when she thinks about how loud Manhattan would be right now, when she thinks about how much higher the staircases climb into the sky, how different the air feels.

Nina nods. “Take it the boss meeting went same as always?”

“Nah,” Vanessa says. “Actually, she told me I have a great eye for color today, and that she thinks I’m improvin’.”

“Oh. Gotta say, you don’t really look like someone who got positive feedback.”

She doesn’t really feel like someone who did. Flora might be happier with her work, but Vanessa isn't: she sees now, that it isn't really her. Not if she's being honest with herself. God, she hates being honest with herself. “Hey,” she says, suddenly, “how come you never told me what was goin’ on before you dropped out?”

Nina gives her a curious, guarded look. “That was nearly three years ago.”

“I ain’t asked before. You coulda told me, you know. I woulda kept it secret.”

“I guess I didn’t wanna make it anyone else’s problem.”

“The fuck kinda answer is that? If that’s your logic should we of just not said nothin’ when Usnavi got beat up over Christmas ‘cause that’s his problem, not yours?”

“That is not the same.”

“It _is_ the same! Talking about it was really hard for all of us, but we still did!"

"Why are you angry at me?" Nina says, aggravatingly calm. "You didn't _have_ to tell me."

“We wanted to. That's what friends are supposed to do. I don’t understand why you never want to tell me nothin’. It's supposed to be different when it's us.”

Nina visibly gives in, shoulders falling to a defeated slant. “You want my honest answer? No bullshit?"

"Yes."

"I didn’t tell you about dropping out or Benny ‘cause I’d rather get a huge thing wrong that nobody finds out about than get a tiny thing wrong where people might see it. And I don’t know how much of that is anxiety and how much is just ego so I just try not to think about it at all till it ends up exploding in my face. There. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“No, not really, but yeah.”

“Sorry. It’s the truth.” Nina flicks her nails against the railings with a faint _ding_. “It’s hard, y’know? It’s hard to be the person I am here and the person everyone back home knows too. It’s easier to just be one at a time. I hate the idea that I might come back home and have everyone telling me I’ve changed and I'm not who they thought I was. _”_

Things are gonna change either way, though. Vanessa knows that. Her mom has a job now and is five months sober and every time they talk it makes her seem more like a real person and simultaneously less like someone Vanessa knows, and she wonders sometimes why this is something that only happened after Vanessa moved out instead of two decades ago when it might have actually made a difference in her life. Nina’s accent is so much more neutral than it used to be before college, she seems more like herself and less like it than she ever used to both at once. Sometimes when Vanessa talks to Ruben he says _coffee_ with a New York w-sound that he never used to. Usnavi called the other day and told her he has ADHD, the thing they all knew but nobody’s ever been allowed to say to him. They’re all a little changed every time she speaks to them. 

“Hold still,” she says, lifting the camera.

Nina makes a disbelieving face, a hint of an exasperated smile at the edges. “Really? Right now?”

“Yes.” Right now, just too late for the sunset to be picturesque, leaning against the railings of the outdoor stairwell almost like sitting on a fire escape but not. Nina, curls and serious face and Stanford hoodie, almost the Nina Vanessa grew up with but not. And Vanessa, whatever the hell Vanessa means, but she’s trying to figure that out.

Even though talking about things sucks the absolute most, she says “Nina, I don’t care if you get things wrong. I just want us to stay friends, even if we ain’t in the same place no more. I need you in my life, okay?”

Vanessa takes the picture as Nina says "okay", and she knows without looking at it that it’s gonna be one of her best.


End file.
